WASHINGTON (AP) — Two U.S. Navy SEALs are missing after conducting a nighttime boarding mission Thursday off the coast of Somalia, according to three U.S. officials.

The SEALs were on an interdiction mission, climbing up a vessel when one got knocked off by high waves. Under their protocol, when one SEAL is overtaken the next jumps in after them.

Both SEALs are still missing. A search and rescue mission is underway and the waters in the Gulf of Aden, where they were operating, are warm, two of the U.S. officials said.

The U.S. Navy has conducted regular interdiction missions, where they have intercepted weapons on ships that were bound for Houthi-controlled Yemen.

  • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    10 months ago

    Weapons on ships boud for Yemen...?

    But I thought Iran controlled the Houthis. What is this way off the coast of Somalia in their disputed maritime border with Kenya? Seems a bit out of way for a shipment from Iran.

    Cover up the unspoken mercenary war we've been funding and arming for the last decade that no one talks about blame Iran without mentioning because we already programed people to associate Houtis with Iran.

    Also we hope you all forgot about that 7 countries in 5 years memo from the Project for a New American Century 9/11 oopsie daisy thing that included Somalia.

    Archive beyond the paywall -

    In Kenya, soldiers traumatized by the U.S.-backed war in Somalia often face discipline instead of treatment cw shhh war PTSD

    In the U.S.-backed war against the militant group al-Shabab in Somalia, Americans wage their battles mostly from the air, with drones.

    On the ground, at sweltering checkpoints and in dusty trenches across Somalia’s southernmost states, soldiers from neighboring Kenya do almost all the fighting.

    One of them was Christopher Katitu, a low-ranking grunt with the Kenya Defence Forces, or KDF, who spent two years manning a mounted machine gun from a trench in Kismayo, a port city shattered by street-to-street skirmishes over territory. Then, when al-Shabab killed almost 150 students at a university just across the border in Garissa, Kenya, Katitu was sent to the edges of the tense city to guard a highway checkpoint day and night.

    A kind of pressure was building up in his brain, one he could not quite place. It was not just the war — money problems were intensifying at home, too, and his wife was angry with him. Through almost a decade in the army, he had never seen a counselor.

    On a short leave home from Garissa, Katitu had a mental breakdown. But instead of being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, he was jailed and court-martialed when he tried to rejoin his battalion.

    Since Kenya joined the war in Somalia in 2011, the United States has given its government more than half a billion dollars in security assistance.